Fatale Fata Morgana
by LunaSeasMoonChild
Summary: There's more to Zoe's hell than her boyfriend breaking up with her repeatedly.


_**Author's notes:**_ Yeah, so I thought Zoe's hell was kinda shallow, and they didn't even show a glimpse of it. So, I thought there must be more to it. And this was what came to me in my head.

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Zoe opened her eyes, finding herself in a very different place from the living room of the Robichaux Academy. In fact, she recognized her old bedroom at her parents' house.

She struggled to gather her senses and her wits, reorganize her shambled bearings. She recalled partaking in the Seven Wonders, and being in the midst of the test for the talent to accomplish _descensum_.

If that were so, that meant she was in—

But she was in her bedroom, in her family's house.

She was _home_.

Why was she at home when she was supposed to be in hell…?

"Zoe."

Hearing a familiar voice calling her name, Zoe turned to see Kyle standing at her bedroom door. The relief of his seeing his handsome face faded as she regarded his somber, serious expression, and keeping in mind that her soul was in limbo, she worried about seeing him here in what was supposed to be her version of hell, or whatever this was.

Was this his soul? Had it not gone back to his body when they resurrected him with sewed up body parts? Maybe that was why he was here in front of her, right here, right now, when her soul was in _descensum_ mode.

"Kyle," Running to him, she flung her arms around his neck in a tight hug. "What are you doing here at my house?"

Kyle's hands gripped her wrists and slowly extricated her away from him.

"I'm here because I'm breaking up with you."

Zoe frowned in confusion, her head jolting back a bit in skepticism. "What…? But why?"

"You already know."

"No, I don't."

"Because I choose Madison."

"That's bullshit." Zoe countered. This all had to be a lie. This place, wherever she had been taken, it would not be able to disillusion her. She knew better; she was secure in Kyle's feelings for her.

"Doesn't matter. At least her gift's not," Kyle's face scrunched up in disgust, "freaky. Telekinesis is actually cool. But a killer vagina? I think I'll pass."

Zoe shook her head. This impersonator in front of her was _not_ Kyle, at least not the Kyle she _knew_ , she told herself even as her heart thudded out of rhythm, a sign of the first wave of uncertainty.

Maybe if she could convince this version of Kyle not to break up with her, maybe she would pass this trial and get back to the living world. "But I'm the one you love. You said you love me."

"Yeah, right about the time I was dumb as fuck, like a little helpless baby bird, right?" Kyle spoke nonchalantly, as if he wasn't belittling himself. "I'd just been pieced back together and shittily brought back to life by your shitty efforts with your shitty powers."

"You love me," Her hands were shaking. Somewhere inside her, her doubts were being unearthed and dug up to the surface, slowly and surely crawling into the confines of her heart and breaking down the foundation of her certainty. "I know it. You said so yourself."

"Nobody loves you, Zoe." Kyle scoffed. "Hell, even your parents don't want you."

"That's not true… they love me!"

"That might have been true before they learned you inherited the faulty gene in the family of having the cursed cunt."

"You don't know my parents! You never met them!" Zoe countered angrily. "You've never met them!"

"I don't need to," Kyle mockingly scoffed as he shrugged his shoulders. "They sent you off and never bothered to contact you. Meaning, they've conveniently forgotten all about you. At this point, I'm pretty sure they pretend you don't exist."

Zoe shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut, though tears still made their way down her cheeks. That was one observation she'd didn't want to bother with.

When she arrived at the academy, she thought her mother would at least call (ask how she was, was she settling down nicely, had she made any new friends, what did she think of the school…) but the ensuing silence from her parents greatly upset her, not to mention, they had callously sent her off to somewhere unfamiliar and far from her friends and family right after Charlie's funeral, with no regard to her state of mind. They hadn't even given her time to properly grieve or come to terms with what happened and what her body was capable of, before shipping her off to some forsaken school where nobody knew her or her family. She was a daddy's girl, and the fact that her father hadn't even come out of his study to see her before Myrtle whisked her away across the country hurt too much. She'd felt discarded and abandoned just because she possessed a genetic supernatural affliction.

"And Charlie?" The derision in his chuckle cut through Zoe, vulnerable and weak to his verbal stabs after hitting the mark with his commentary about her parents. "Let's not even talk about him."

"He loved me, maybe in that teeny-bopper kind, but he loved me."

"Please, he just wanted to get into your pants. Too bad for him, you were his last fuck. And he didn't even get to cum."

Dispelling Kyle's crudeness, Zoe shook her head. "Charlie was my first love… and I was his…"

"Too bad you're also his last love. He died because you loved him."

"I didn't mean for it to happen!" She screeched in defense, his words getting to her.

"The first time your vagina killed someone, it was manslaughter. The second time, however… now that was homicide."

"He was a rapist!"

"And you're a murderer. Between the two of you, you're the one eligible for the death penalty here in New Orleans."

Breathing deeply to quell her raising anxiety, Zoe stopped to examine herself and her mindset quickly. She would never regret what she'd done at the hospital to that bastard, not with what he'd done to Madison. Madison was a bitch through and through, but she didn't deserve such a horror to happen to her, her femininity and humanity defiled in the name of cruel pleasure. Those frat boys, had they lived, would not have felt a shred of remorse over their crime. They might've even celebrated it as a victory, a highlight of party night sex, brandishing that event like a trophy from winning a championship game. Another sin in reparation of a sin did not make her noble like a Robin Hood, but justice was a harsh judge that inflicted— demanded— even harsher penalty. Her reprisal against a criminal made her one as well, and whether she was the worse one or not, she could not determine up until now.

"But you love me, even with how I am," Zoe entreated him as she cupped his cheeks, connecting his darkened eyes with her mahogany ones, pleading an understanding to come to pass, a softening of his severity. "I… I know you did. You _do._ "

Kyle suddenly grabbed her arms, yanking her hands away from his face. Zoe was shocked at the sudden movement, and then when his fingers dug into her flesh. She let out a cry, but Kyle's grip did not loosen in mercy, and his tongue was not coated with sympathy.

"I never would have been killed if I hadn't met you! I would still be in school! I would have graduated and become an engineer! I could have achieved my dreams! But because of you, I died!

"But you know what's worse than dying, Zoe? Hmm? Being brought back to life only to find out that you can't have your life back! That you can't go back to living the life you had! I lost everything I've worked so hard for!"

Hearing Kyle voice out his frustrations validated her fears, her uncertainties, her guilt…

"Please," Zoe's plea came out in a whimper, "You're hurting me…"

"I'm hurting you?" Kyle scoffed. " _I'm_ hurting _you_?" He gave her a violent shake. "You sewed me up with the body parts of my dead friends. You brought me back to my mother who raped me again, you chained me up like an animal in the greenhouse, and you tried to kill me with a gun! And you're telling me that _I'm_ hurting _you_?!"

Her hazel orbs revealed themselves when she opened her teary eyes. "I didn't know about your mother then. If I'd known, I wouldn't have brought you back to her! She was grieving, I couldn't… I'm so sorry."

Meeting Alice had triggered in Zoe the painful memory of the way Charlie's mom looked at his funeral. Being an only child, Charlie had been raised by his single mother, his father being out of the picture since he was a baby. Throughout the burial, the wish to have the power to bring back Charlie to his mother had clung to Zoe. Zoe was seeing that same scenario play out with Kyle's mother, and now that she was aware of her magical gifts, she resolved to change this grieving mother's fate. So she returned Kyle home to his mother. She hadn't known that she would be handing him back to his abuser. She hadn't known about that; she hadn't known him long enough to be entrusted with that secret, if ever Kyle would have confided in her had he lived long enough to establish a friendship or a romantic relationship with her.

Was all of this a reflection of the truth inside Kyle's heart? Was she being confronted with the verity of Kyle's thoughts and feelings that he never dared to utter or express? Was she facing off with the deepest, darkest depths of his psyche? Was this the truth that she had been shunning, unable to acknowledge?

"Now, tell me why I shouldn't break up with you."

"Please, Kyle," Zoe sobbed as she lifted her hands to rest on his cheeks, "Please don't leave me. You're all I want…" Her hands dropped to grip the front of his shirt, her forehead falling to his shoulder. "You're all I have…"

Kyle remained quiet. He remained still as Zoe silently wept. Him not pushing her away gave Zoe a slight hope, that maybe he was softening, that he was reconsidering, that he was thinking of granting her forgiveness. Maybe he was realizing that she was not at fault. Fate had fucked her up, shoved into her hands a bad deal out of life. All because she was born with a curse, not because of something she'd done. If all her misfortune could be traced to a decision on her part, she would've been able to be at peace with it, because with mistakes made, that meant she had control over it and she would've never let it happen ever again. But no. That was not the case with her. Misfortune had been stitched into her fate the moment her genes were assembled into a being. The catastrophe in her life was inevitable the moment she was born.

Kyle lifted his hands to cup Zoe's face, pushing her back a bit so he could look into her tear-streaked face, swollen eyes and red nose. His thumbs caressed her skin, sliding through the wetness of her tears, reminding Zoe of the time when she was packing their stuff to escape the academy on Myrtle's insistence.

"You kill the people you love, Zoe." His voice took on pity, a strong contrast to his previous bitter disposition. "You're that toxic. You don't just hurt the people you love, you _kill_ them."

"You're all I have!" She screamed at him, her eyes squeezing shut, but unable to prevent the tears from escaping through her lids.

"Your curse isn't your vagina. It's your love," Kyle maintained a soft, level tone even after being shouted at. "It's your love that _will kill_ the people you love. It's what will take them away from you." His resigned tone, so sure of the truth of his declaration, was more than Zoe could bear.

"You're not worth being loved by anyone."

' _This place is not real.'_

That singular affirmation suddenly resonated loudly in her head, a reminder or a clue. With only that, Zoe became determined to hold on to the broken shards of her shattered resolve and use it as a weapon even if it cut through her and made her bleed more. "You're wrong! I deserve to be loved!" Zoe flung off Kyle's hold on her arms and stepped back, her eyes now blazing with steel being forged in fire to become a sword and a shield. "I deserve to be happy! I'm not going to be afraid of falling in love just because of this curse! I refuse to be driven to living in the dark because I'm scared of my powers! I can be happy even with this!" Feeling empowered, she continued, her defiance giving her strength. "I can still be loved even like this."

Taking a deep breath and holding her hands to her ears in defiance, an act of her unwillingness to listen any further to him and her refusal to accept all he'd told her, Zoe tightly closed her eyes and prepared her diaphragm to release all her pent-up stress and pain into a shattering scream, meant to serve as an empowerment, " _Go away_!"

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Zoe sat up with a gasp, as if she had just broken through the surface of the water after struggling from drowning, and was gulping much needed air into her lungs to revive herself.

The sight that welcomed her upon her soul's return to her body, the first person she would see, was a bewildered and worried Kyle, standing just a short distance from her in a fine suit. Still disoriented, Zoe wondered if this Kyle was another fatal mirage, a deceptive vision of safe haven but in truth a spew of vitriol instead, that maybe she had woken up in another circle of hell to face off with Kyle once more, and she was actually not yet back from _descensum_.

"What happened to you?" Queenie's question with worried and curious mixing in her tone made Zoe realize she really was back in the realm of the living, and she was far out of her nightmarish world.

The emotions she'd felt from that encounter with Kyle as she was under also migrated along with her soul's return, and the weight of that hurt and pain still had its claws dug deep into her, the heavy cross of guilt and regret still imprinted on her shoulders.

Zoe fought down the tremors running through her body like an earthquake threatening to destroy the foundation of her sanity. Her eyes filled with tears as she could still hear the echoes of Kyle's words in hell, and she tried to give a watered down version of what she went through, not wanting to really delve into detailed storytelling and relive it all over again. "Kyle and I kept breaking up… On a loop… he said he didn't love me, over and over… over and over…"

Seeing Zoe's anguish and distress as she recounted her _descensum_ experience prompted Kyle to rush towards her, driven both by love and alarm to comfort her.

Though still shaken and affected, she felt reassured just a little bit when she saw Kyle concernedly frown and subtly shake his head as he heard her brief recountal. "It's okay," he murmured, his arms enclosing her like a protective shelter, and placed a kiss on the crown of Zoe's head. She held up her hands to clutch the roots of her hair, as if to tug out the cruel echoes of taunt and blame ringing loudly once more in her memory, an opposition to Kyle's soft-spoken reassurance earlier, and she let out a despairing cry.

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 _ **A/n:**_ Sorry, couldn't help myself from adding a hint of Violate there. HeheXD

And damn, I had to read a bit about the death penalty in Louisiana for this one-shot. X_x

 _*Fatale Fata Morgana_ , Italian for "fatal mirage"


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